We just finished a big shootout for The Nightfly, our first in nearly three years. There is a Hot Stamper pressing on the site as I write these words.
Since we do shootouts throughout the day on four out of the five days of the work week (the fifth is devoted to shopping for records locally by our main listening guy, Riley), there is nothing special about any of that.
It takes us about three years to find enough clean copies of an album like The Nightfly to get a shootout going these days, a marked depature from earlier in the 21st century when common domestic pressings were everywhere, and usually for cheap. Those days are gone and we will never see their like again.
In this case it turned out to be the 2021 Rhino remaster on Heavy German vinyl, mastered by Chris Bellman. Or was it?
We of course found it to be awful, as we so often do with Mr. Bellman’s records. It’s lean and recessed. Over the 42 years I have been playing the original Robert Ludwig pressings of the album, I have heard some that sounded that way. I wrote about it many years ago, trying to make the point that when you hear a copy that sounds lean and bright like a CD, what you are hearing is a bad pressing.
The good ones are not like that. They are rich and smooth and even, gulp, kind of analog sounding.
Glossy and artificial, sure, and much too heavily-processed for my taste, but I can live with that sound, even though it’s hardly my idea of hi-fidelity.
Hold Your Horses
Somebody pulled a fast one it appears, as the pressings without the initials CB in the dead wax are not cut by him, even though he is credited on discogs and one assumes on the jacket or inner sleeve as well. The copy we played had no CB in the dead wax.
Even the Heavy Vinyl crowd can hear how bad this “MS” recut is, and that is really saying something considering how fawning most reviewers are when writing about these remastered records. Some samples follow:
A few points to make about this screwup.
- Thank god that Chris Bellman is off the hook for this disastrous piece of vinyl trash. He’s made a lot of very bad sounding records, but at least he didn’t make this one.
- Anyone who thinks this is the best sounding record they’ve ever played (see some of the comments above and below) is setting a low bar for sound quality. It’s enjoyable enough, but the best ever or top ten? Yikes.
- And, last but not least, Rhino stops using the CB cutting and just keeps pressing out the record with dodgy mastering by somebody else, so inferior it can even be heard by the guys who review records on Discogs? That is some shady business, that is.
- To be fair, the record labels who made all the vintage records we sell were every bit as dodgy when it came to the quality of their releases, especially considering that most of the reissues they churned out were of dismal quality.
- There is one difference though. The major labels never made any claims regarding sound quality, possibly because they had no way to judge the sound of the records they released. They left those judgments to the reviewers, assuming any of them were so inclined. But these new Heavy Vinyl pressings are supposed to be of superior quality.
- Our judgment is that they are not. They’re mostly just awful, and this one fits right in with its sub-par brethren. Doubtful any clean Robert Ludwig mastered pressing wouldn’t sound quite a bit better.
- Whether the Robert Ludwig mastered pressings are better than the real Chris Bellman pressings is a question we cannot answer at this time.
Some of our basic commentary for The Nightfly follows.
What to Listen For
The upper mids on certain tracks of both sides have a tendency to be brighter than we would have liked.
Ruby Baby on side one can be that way, and the title track on side two has some of the wannabe hit single radio EQ that makes it less likely to please, so to speak.
Other records with a tendency to have boosted upper mids can be found here.
On a good copy the first track of each side should be all you need to hear.
Here are hundreds other titles with specific advice on what to listen for on some of the albums we’ve played in shootouts.
If you know how to do shootouts, you know how to find good sounding records.
180 gram High Performance Vinyl
Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino used to bill their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.
The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they put out starting around 2000.
If this is what vinyl actually sounds like, years ago I would have switched to CD fast enough to make your head spin.
Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I’ve ever heard.
The Yes Album sounds like a cassette, a mere ghost of the real thing.
Further Reading
- Hi-Fi beats my-fi if you are at all serious about audio
- Hot Stamper pressings of the music of Steely Dan available now
- Disagree with our review? Please be so kind as to back up your claims
